Skills for Software Smokejumpers

Skills for Software Smokejumpers

©2007 Don Gray Do you know about smokejumpers? They’re brave, self-sufficient firefighters who parachute into remote areas wearing eighty pounds of gear and ready to fight a forest fire. If the jump goes well, they land safely. After extinguishing the fire, they...

Data and Doing Things

Johanna recently blogged about Making Milestones Visible. Jerry added that milestones not only need to be visible, they have to be actionable. The example they used was having a vehicle go 100,000 miles. Data To Johanna it was a milestone she missed because her...

Changing Words to Change Reality

Words interest me. They don’t exist in the real world. They’re the names, and descriptions we give to the items and events we notice in our environment. A classic on how well this works is Blind Men and the Elephant. It’s a short read, I’ll...

Problems vs Opportunities

Problems or Opportunities? Where should you focus your effort? Kurt Simmons asked this question in ProblemsVersusOpportunites. He shared some (what I think) are valid thoughts. I agree with them on at a cursory level. But in keeping with this blog’s theme, An...
A Multi-use Model

A Multi-use Model

© Don Gray 2007, 2010 Models are like kitchen utensils. You need a variety of them, and you should know when and how to use them. They should be useful for more than a single task. I recently started exploring the first explicit model I learned years ago. The...